Zenyatta Ventures Ltd V.ZEN announced October 11 that Peter Ravenscroft has joined its board. Ravenscroft was most recently Head of Global Exploration for Cliffs Natural Resources, which owns 11.5% of Zenyatta. He worked previously for Rio Tinto, Hamersley Iron, De Beers, Anglo American and Gencor.

Zenyatta owns the Albany property of 300,000 acres in Ontario’s James Bay Lowlands. The company has discovered high-grade vein-type graphite there, and on October 3, it announced that a test conducted by SGS Canada (Lakefield) on concentrates from the Albany Graphite Project had demonstrated a leaching process capable of producing a 97.2% carbon (total) graphite product. Zenyatta has targeted purity levels greater than 99% C, and results from a second series of tests are expected soon.

President/CEO Aubrey Eveleigh spoke to Kevin Michael Grace October 15.RW: Is your company named after the album by The Police?

AE: Yes.

RW: You’re a fan?

AE: A big Police and Sting fan. In fact, I’m staring at the album right now. I’ve got it framed in my office.

AE: And Jerry named his horse Zenyatta after the Police album, much like we named our resource company after the album. In fact, I did get a letter from Jerry Moss’ lawyer, and he thought we were trying to steal the thunder from the horse, but we named it after the album.

RW: What’s the significance of Peter Ravenscroft joining your board?

AE: Peter has an amazing bio. He’s done a lot of things worldwide with major mining companies. He brings a lot of experience and a big network of people. It’s a big catch for us to get someone of Peter’s calibre.

RW: You announced results of up to 97.2% carbon October 3.

AE: From our first test. It’s very important to get high purity. The better the quality, the higher the price you’ll get. And everybody is looking for anything over 90%. We’re trying to get to 99% because that’s where the synthetic market is at, 99.5%, and most of the graphite world is using synthetic right now. So where the natural graphite industry is about a billion-dollar market, the synthetic graphite market is about $13 billion. We want to compete in that space.

RW: The only source of very-high-purity graphite is Sri Lanka, correct?

AE: That’s right. And the only high-grade vein-type graphite project being developed in the world today is Zenyatta’s Albany Project.

RW: I read an interview with Simon Moores of Industrial Minerals, and he said, “Focus on how a company plans to process it and get it to the market. That will make or break a graphite company.” So that’s the question I’d ask you.

AE: Absolutely. Synthetic is made from petroleum coke from a refinery, so it’s the waste from producing oil. They take that and upgrade it to graphite. Now in the process there’s a lot of thermal treatment, and that’s very expensive. That’s why it sells for $7,000 to $20,000 a tonne. Because Zenyatta is starting out with natural graphite at such high quality, the process to get it to synthetic-level purity won’t cost anywhere near as much. So we can compete against synthetic.

What were doing right now at Lakefield is fine-tuning the process to get it to 99% plus. Once we figure out the process, we’ll be able to determine how much it costs to get there.

RW: Are you going straight to a PEA?

AE: After we do all this work at Lakefield, we’re going to do infill drilling for a 43-101 report, and then we’ll go into a preliminary economic assessment.

RW: Could you give me a tentative path to production?

AE: It’s quite conceivable that these things are so simple it could be two to three years out.

RW: When can we expect your resource estimate?

AE: We’re working on that over the winter, and we’d expect it to be out this spring.

RW: You’re still looking for nickel, copper and platinum group metals at Albany?

AE: Yes. We have 28 different blocks, and the graphite is on one block. We have more airborne geophysical targets to drill, and that will be taking place this winter as well.

RW: How much cash do you have?

AE: We have about $1.7 or $1.8 million left.

RW: And that will last you how long?

AE: If we get back to drilling, it will last us until next summer.

RW: Your share price has more than doubled since the middle of August. To what would you attribute that?

RW: Partly it’s market sentiment changing in September. And we’ve put out some good news, with the purity results and Peter Ravenscroft. There is an anticipation building that we’re onto something significant here.

RW: Is spring, graphite was described as the “flavour of the month.” Would you say there is more confidence in the longterm prospects for graphite now?

AE: Things have certainly calmed down. A few months ago, graphite was the only buzz in Toronto because the rest of the resource stocks weren’t doing well. Now people are educating themselves about graphite, the different types, the importance of purity. It’s got huge potential with all the new sectors coming online. For example, lithium-ion batteries, fuel cells and the new reactors are all geared to green technology, and we need graphite for this. There is probably room for several graphite mines in the future because of this.

RW: Is there a race to get the first new mines into production?

AE: It’s not so much a race because even if you’re the fastest to the line, if your quality isn’t good, then it doesn’t matter; you’re not going to sell it. Nobody will want it. But if the quality comes through, you’ll have no problem getting the end users to buy your product.

At press time, Zenyatta Ventures had 39.6 million shares trading at $0.44 for a market cap of $17.4 million.

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